Persistence, Domain Models, and Portals...

[Eric Nielsen]

I'm trying to understand some of the basics of portal development. (Please see my other thread for some more basic concerns).

Now I've gotten JBoss Portal installed and runable. I've read over the Portlet Tutorial with Struts 2. And while I can understand all the pieces, I'm not sure I like some of the implications.

Here is the tutorial:http://struts.apache.org/2.x/docs/struts-2-portlet-tutorial.html

They are building a simple portlet that provides for managing a list of bookmarks. All of the persistence is handled via instances of PortletPreferences. I'm having a hard time visualizing how this would work when a more complex data model backs the Portlet (ie the type of thing that Hibernate is normally used for).

I am working on a rather complex application. The application's interface looks very portal like, but perhaps I'm using the wrong tool for the job. I will need a complex domain model, that is shared by many disparate portlets. Am I wrong to try to use a portal solution?